[Hac-announce] An assessment of the present and prediction of the future by Tom Friedman

[Manny Sholem Ratafia]

This NY Times article by Tom Friedman covers a lot of ground. I found it 
to be a very worthwhile read.

Manny

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/opinion/trump-israel-iran.html?algo=combo_clicks_decay_6_lda_unique_80_diversified&block=3&campaign_id=142&emc=edit_fory_20241127&fellback=false&imp_id=4994687102467326&instance_id=140791&nl=for-you&nlid=46841805&pool=channel-replacement-ls&rank=8&regi_id=46841805&req_id=3334964139543146&segment_id=184303&surface=for-you-email-channelless&user_id=4aa61a7a85f469ed918ee787f817ccb4&variant=0_channel_translated_pool_popularity_pers

<https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>

_Opinion <https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>_

Thomas L. Friedman


  Mr. Trump, Do You Realize How Much the World Has Changed Since You
  Were President?

  Nov. 26, 2024

By Thomas L. Friedman <https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-l-friedman>

Opinion Columnist

Donald Trump left the White House nearly four years ago. Given his 
self-confidence, I suspect he is now thinking: “What could be so 
different? I’ve got this.”

Well, I just traveled from a reporting trip in Tel Aviv to a conference 
in the United Arab Emirates to a deep dive with Google’s DeepMind 
artificial intelligence team in London, and I think the president-elect 
would be wise to remember a famous aphorism: There are decades when 
nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.

What I saw and heard exposed me to three giant, shifting tectonic plates 
that will have profound implications for the new administration.

*The most significant geopolitical event*

In just the last two months, the Israeli military has inflicted a defeat 
on Iran that approaches its 1967 Six-Day War defeat of Egypt, Syria and 
Jordan. Full stop. Let’s review:

Over the past few decades, Iran built a formidable threat network that 
seemed to put Israel into an octopuslike grip. It became widely accepted 
that Israel was deterred from striking at Iran’s nuclear facilities 
because Iran had armed the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon with enough 
precision rockets to destroy Israel’s ports, airports, high-tech 
factories, air bases and infrastructure.

Not so fast. It turned out that the Mossad and Israel’s cyber Unit 8200 
had been forging what became one of the country’s greatest intelligence 
successes ever. They planted explosive devices in the pagers and 
walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s military commanders, developed human 
and technological tracking capabilities to find Hezbollah’s top leaders, 
painstakingly identified storage facilities in Lebanon and Syria for 
Hezbollah’s most lethal precision rockets and then systematically took 
many of them out by air in October 
<https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/HEZBOLLAH-PAGERS/mopawkkwjpa/>. 


The result is that Hezbollah looks likely to accept a 60-day cease-fire 
<https://www.reuters.com/world/lebanese-sources-biden-macron-set-announce-hezbollah-israel-ceasefire-deal-2024-11-25/> 
with Israel in Lebanon negotiated by the U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein. 
This is a big deal. It means that, even if just for 60 days, Hezbollah 
and, by extension, Iran have decided to delink themselves from Hamas in 
Gaza and stop the firing from Lebanon for the first time since Oct. 8, 
2023, the day after Hamas invaded Israel. We will see if it lasts, but 
if it does, it will increase the pressure on Hamas to agree to a 
cease-fire and hostage release with Israel, more on Israel’s terms.

There is a reason for this. Hezbollah’s mother ship has suffered a real 
blow. According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-israel-has-destroyed-all-four-of-irans-s-300-batteries/>, 
Israel’s April strike on Iran eliminated one of four Russian-supplied 
S-300 surface-to-air missile defense batteries around Tehran, and Israel 
destroyed the remaining three batteries on Oct. 26. Israel also damaged 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-israels-retaliatory-strike-on-iran-hit-component-of-its-nuke-program/> 
Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities and its ability to 
produce the solid fuel used in long-range ballistic missiles. In 
addition, according to Axios 
<https://www.axios.com/2024/11/15/iran-israel-destroyed-active-nuclear-weapons-research-facility>, 
Israel’s Oct. 26 strike on Iran, which was a response to an earlier 
Iranian attack on Israel, also destroyed equipment used to create the 
explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device, setting back 
Iran’s efforts in nuclear weapons research.

A senior Israeli defense official told me that the Oct. 26 attack on 
Iran “was lethal, precise and a surprise.” And up to now, the Iranians 
“don’t know technologically how we hit them. So they are at the most 
vulnerable point they have been in this generation: Hamas is not there 
for them, Hezbollah is not there for them, their air defenses are not 
there anymore, their ability to retaliate is sharply diminished, and 
they are worried about Trump.”

Which means that Tehran is either riper than ever for negotiations to 
curb its nuclear program or riper than ever for an attack by Israel or 
the Trump administration — or both — to destroy those nuclear 
facilities. Either way, Trump will face choices he did not have four 
years ago.

**

*It is not only a new Iran that Trump will be dealing with but also a 
new Israel*

There were legitimate reasons President Biden denounced 
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-condemns-icc-arrest-warrants-085851272.html> 
the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and 
his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in 
Gaza against a Hamas enemy that deliberately embedded 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/12/hamas-death-toll-gaza-sinwar-messages/> 
itself among civilians. The same court never issued 
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/09/assads-war-crimes-why-hasnt-he-been-charged-with-war-crimes-by-the-international-criminal-court.html> 
an arrest warrant for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose army 
killed hundreds of thousands 
<https://www.cfr.org/article/syrias-civil-war> of his own people. The 
I.C.C. said Syria is not a member. But neither is Israel. It is also odd 
that the I.C.C. issued a warrant only for the Hamas leader Mohammed 
Deif, who is widely believed to be dead, and not for the very much alive 
Muhammad Sinwar <https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-825130> 
(the younger brother of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar), who is now 
reportedly running Hamas in Gaza and was a commander in the Oct. 7 
attack on Israel.

But while the I.C.C. warrants are questionable, they were also 
avoidable. The strategy that Netanyahu has imposed on his military is 
one of the ugliest in Israel’s history: Go into Gaza, destroy as much of 
Hamas as you can, don’t be too worried about civilian casualties, then 
leave the remnants of Hamas in charge to loot food convoys and 
intimidate the local population — then rinse and repeat. Go back in, 
smash and leave no one better in charge, creating a permanent Somalia on 
Israel’s border.

Why is he doing this? Because Bibi is being directed by the far-right 
Jewish supremacists he needs to stay in power and possibly out of prison 
on charges of corruption. And the stated goal 
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-10-08/ty-article/israels-far-right-government-wants-to-use-oct-7-to-occupy-gaza-and-settle-it-with-jews/00000192-6897-ded3-a7bb-7df766910000> 
of those Jewish supremacists is to extend Israeli settlements from the 
West Bank right through Gaza. They oppose any scenario in which the 
Palestinian Authority is gradually installed in Gaza as part of an Arab 
peacekeeping force to replace Hamas. They fear the Palestinian Authority 
might then become a legitimate partner for a two-state solution.

When you fight a war with this many civilian casualties for a year and 
offer no vision of peace 
<https://www.haaretz.com/magazine/2024-03-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/its-a-war-of-cruel-rich-people-israels-form-of-combat-in-gaza-is-unusually-wasteful/0000018e-1aa8-d1cc-abfe-dfadbc010000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=iOS_Native> 
with the other side, you invite the I.C.C.

Attention, President-elect Trump: Netanyahu will tell you that Israel is 
defending the free world in defeating the dark forces of Hamas, 
Hezbollah and Iran. There is truth in that. But there is also truth in 
the fact that he is doing it to defend a Jewish supremacist apartheid 
vision in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s a dirty business. If you just 
unquestionably wrap your arms around him, you will get yourself and 
America dirty, too. You will also ensure that your Jewish grandchildren 
will one day learn what it is to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish 
state is a pariah.

**

*Artificial general intelligence is probably coming on Trump’s watch*

Polymathic artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., was still largely 
in the realm of science fiction when Trump left office four years ago. 
It is fast becoming nonfiction. And A.S.I. — artificial super 
intelligence — may be one day as well.

A.G.I. means machines will be endowed with intelligence as good as the 
smartest human in any field, but because of its capabilities to 
integrate learning across many fields, it will probably become better 
than any average doctor, lawyer or computer programmer. A.S.I. is a 
computer brain that can exceed what any human can do in any field and 
then, with its polymathic ability, it could produce insights far beyond 
anything humans could do or even imagine. It might even invent its own 
language we don’t understand.

How we adapt to A.G.I. was not part of the 2024 presidential campaign. I 
predict it will be a central theme of the 2028 election. Between now and 
then, every leader in the world — but particularly the presidents of 
America and China, the two A.I. superpowers — will be judged by how well 
they enable their countries to get the best and cushion the worst from 
the coming A.I. storm.

 From what I heard from leading A.I. scientists and Nobel Prize winners 
at Google DeepMind’s conference on how A.I. is already driving 
breakthroughs in scientific discovery, A.G.I. is likely to be achieved 
in the next three to five years.

Two DeepMind scientists just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their 
A.I. AlphaFold system, which predicts proteins’ structures and is 
already being used by scientists to invent drugs and materials all over 
the world. Now DeepMind is working on GraphCast 
<https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for-faster-and-more-accurate-global-weather-forecasting/>, 
an A.I. system that can produce staggeringly precise 10-day weather 
forecasts in less than a minute, and on Gnome 
<https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/>, 
which has identified some 2.2 million new inorganic crystals that could 
be useful in manufacturing everything from computer chips to batteries 
to solar panels.

It’s the tip of an iceberg. It will change or challenge virtually every 
job. While I was in Tel Aviv, I visited the lab of Mentee Robotics, an 
Israeli start-up, and was given a demonstration of a humanoid robot, 
roughly my height, powered by sensors and A.I. with humanlike hand 
dexterity, a voice and perception that, as its website says 
<https://www.menteebot.com/company/>, “can be personalized and adjusted 
to different environments and tasks using natural human interaction.”

President-elect Trump, if you think blue-collar workers without college 
degrees are facing challenges today, wait until four years from now.

But that’s not Trump’s only challenge. If these A.I. powers fall into 
the wrong hands or are used by existing powers in the wrong ways, we 
could be dealing with possibly civilizational extinction events.

Which is why we need to be discussing systems of A.I. control now. And 
it’s why two DeepMind co-founders, Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis, were 
signers of a 23-word open letter, issued in May 2023, along with other 
leaders of the A.I. universe, which declared 
<https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk>, “Mitigating the risk of 
extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other 
societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

But this can’t just be left to the companies. We tried that with social 
networks, and it ended badly.

President-elect Trump, you may think that your second term will be 
judged by how many tariffs you impose on China. I beg to differ. When it 
comes to U.S.-China relations, I think your legacy — as well as 
President Xi Jinping’s — will be determined by how quickly, effectively 
and collaboratively the United States and China come up with a shared 
technical and ethical framework embedded in each A.I. system that 
prevents it from becoming destructive on its own — without human 
direction — or being useful to bad actors who might want to deploy it 
for destructive purposes.

History will not look kindly on you, President-elect Trump, if you 
choose to prioritize the price of toys for American tots over an 
agreement with China on the behavior of A.I. bots.

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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined 
the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of 
seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the 
National Book Award. @tomfriedman <https://twitter.com/tomfriedman> 
•Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/thomaslfriedman>

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 27, 2024, Section A, 
Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Three Challenges Will 
Shape Trump’s Legacy.

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